Monday, January 28, 2008, 03:04 PM
Veteran industry technologist to spearhead next phase of company's growth
Boston, Mass.—January 28, 2008—HRMDirect Inc., a Boston-based provider of talent management software based on a 100% Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform on an industry-leading low-cost model, today announced the appointment of Django Bliss as Chief Technical Officer. Bliss was the founder of resume parsing and applicant tracking firm HireAbility, and served as its chief technical officer from 1997 prior to joining HRMDirect. “Django built one of the largest and most robust on-demand infrastructures in our industry,” said HRMDirect president and co-founder Colin Kingsbury. “With surging demand for 100% SaaS talent management solutions, it was time for us to ramp up our senior talent to be ready for the market.”
HRMDirect chairman AG Lavoie added that the current economic climate strongly favors low-cost SaaS providers like HRMDirect. “Companies keep hiring. Turnover happens. The difference is that companies are no longer willing to pour champagne over mediocre applications and are starting to look for real value from their applicant tracking provider. As a price leader, we benefit from that.” Sales to larger clients have been increasing steadily over the past two quarters, Lavoie said, with a major hotel operator and a leading global security firm signing annual service agreements in the past 30 days.
“I’m tremendously excited to be joining the HRMDirect team,” Bliss said. “I saw a culture of innovation closely aligned with client needs here that was unique.” With one of the industry’s only ground-up 100% SaaS strategies, Bliss felt that HRMDirect was uniquely positioned to deliver rapid product advancement while maintaining its position as an aggressive cost leader. “Changing times demand new approaches. HRMDirect’s focus on delivering maximum out-of-the-box integrated services is a real game-changer.”
About HRMDirect
Founded in Boston in 2004, HRMDirect currently serves thousands of recruiters and over 120 companies from household names including Publishers Clearing House, Blackwater Worldwide, and the American Hospital Association, to fast-growing startups like Zillow and ZoomInfo, in a variety of industries from manufacturing to retail, hospitality, healthcare, and high technology. With no setup fees, typical deployments completed in 30 days or less, and a fanatical focus on ease-of-use, HRMDirect is dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of implementing an applicant tracking system, which many companies require for state and federal compliance including EEOC and OFCCP affecting most FDIC-insured banks and federal contractors.
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Media Contact
Jeremy Hoffman
Media Relations, North America
jhoffman@hrmdirect.com
(402) 805-9273
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Sunday, February 11, 2007, 06:47 PM
The Resume Direct 2.1 upgrade has been compeleted on schedule. Recruiter access was restored by approximately 5pm ET on Sunday and all queued applications have completed processing. Client career websites remained online throughout the upgrade so as to prevent the loss of critical hours of candidate attention during the prime weekend hours.
This upgrade comes two years to the day since the launch of Resume Direct in 2005. In this time we have rolled out eight major releases and at least a dozen smaller ones, every one of which was deployed seamlessly with limited or no downtime to all clients. With these we have added over 20 major new features and hundreds of little tweaks and enhancements to maintain our category-leading ease of use.
We want to thank all of you, our valued clients, for your continuing support and constructive feedback. With over 60 clients added in the past twelve months, HRMDirect is rapidly on its way to joining the top tier of applicant tracking providers. While we don't ever want to forget our startup roots, growth provides access to additional resources which we look forward to putting to good use to continue enhancing the HRMDirect client experience.
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Tuesday, February 6, 2007, 10:54 PM
Last month many of you took part in our first Client Satisfaction Survey. And when we say a lot,we mean a lot: a stunning 46% of people responded. These surveys often get response rates in the 4-8% range and most of you took the time to fill out the whole long thing.
We will be talking more about the results over the coming months, but first, a few of the things which stuck out:
- 74% of you use Resume Direct at least once a day.
- 59% had never used an ATS before, while 22% considered themselves "ATS veterans"
- 84% consider our unique apply-by-email a "Must-Have Feature." Wow!
- 95% would recommend Resume Direct
What You Told Us
Above all you told us you want more documentation. We'll write it if you promise to read it! Second, you want more speed and power! No surprise there, and we are gearing up to deliver some big performance upgrades. People now expect web applications to be as responsive as desktop programs and we aim to satisfy.
In terms of major new features, custom fields and enhanced application forms functionality were high scorers. Custom fields are coming out very soon, and we're working hard on some new enhancements for application forms. A sleeper surprise was options for additional email auto-responders, which are now on our radar screen.
Task and process management is something we've been drilling into since the start, and we've always approached this a little differently than everyone else. This was also a very popular area which we were already working on before the survey went out, and we were happily surprised to see something so abstract be recognized so widely.
Last, we were a little surprised to see integrated background checks and assessment tests score at 16 out of 18 possible new features. This remains a messy process and we expected it to be more popular, but that's what keeps elections interesting.
Still, even the lowest scoring ideas had multiple clients voting for them as critical/must-have features. This illustrated very well why most ATS vendors have becomes jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. There is an audience for every feature you can imagine and it is not easy to resist the temptation to implement check-the-box features which only work in scripted demos.
We'll be writing more about our plans for 2007 and beyond but we wanted to once again thank everyone for taking the time to respond in such great detail. The feedback was eagerly anticipated and has already played a key part in many key decisions here.
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